Ted Moser, Senior Partner at Prophet and the author of Winning Through Platforms, joins AMA’s Bennie F. Johnson to talk about his new book, Winning Through Platforms, why the platform is a great company equalizer, and finding the thing you’re passionate about.
Episode: Value of the Platform and Business Re-Engineering
Ted Moser, Senior Partner at Prophet and the author of Winning Through Platforms, joins AMA’s Bennie F. Johnson to talk about his new book, Winning Through Platforms, why the platform is a great company equalizer, and finding the thing you’re passionate about.
Additional information about Ted’s book, Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One, can be found here.
Bennie F. Johnson
Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA's Marketing And. I'm your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In today's episode, we're going to explore the world and life through the lens of marketing, delving into the conversations with individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We'll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not have heard of but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought-provoking conversations, we'll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our special guest is none other than Ted Moser. Ted is a senior partner at Prophet, a growth and transformation consultancy, where he helps leading data and software enabled companies to anticipate market evolution, craft distinctive platform growth strategies, and realize their business and organizational ambitions. Ted's clients work expands innovation, branding, go-to-market excellence, and operational model transformation. Ted also supports global microfinance development as a lifelong commitment.
He has helped to scale opportunities internationally, a microfinance network that has served more than 250 million women, million and children worldwide, and is developing innovative platforms to better serve small stakeholder farms, school proprietors, and urban micro-entrepreneurs. It's his new book that we're going to talk about today, Winning Through Platforms. It's a business book award winner for 2024 and was published as a part of our distinguished AMA Leadership Series. I'd like to welcome to our podcast today, Ted Moser. Ted, thank you for joining me.
Ted Moser
Thanks, Bennie. So good to be here.
Bennie
Well, we're going to jump right on in and talk about the book, Winning Through Platforms, How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One. That's kind of that moment. How do we break through and have a distinction? I love to start off with the top with a really kind of basic definition to make sure we're all on the same page. How do you define platform today?
Ted
Right. Well, that's one of the most confusing words in business today, Bennie, because people mean so many different things when they say it. There's two debates that I think are helpful, but not really helpful. Some people debate what kind of business format is a platform. Is it a SaaS software company, business software as a service, cloud-hosted software? The answer is sort of yes. Is it a content portal like a Netflix or a database company that's
Bennie
Right. Hahaha.
Ted
Let’s you filter through what you want and the answer is yes. Is it an ecosystem connector company like Uber or Airbnb or Zillow? The answer is yes. So it's all of those business formats. What we say is it's really a way of doing business. It's a holistic business system where there's a few key criteria to be a platform company. One is, can I watch my customer?
Bennie
Right.
Ted
Use what it is they bought from me? Do I have visibility? And usually that's something that I need to earn. We talk about the value for visibility exchange. Have I given my customer enough that they will let me watch them as they use what it is that I've sold them? So if I'm Sleep Number, a mattress company, if my beds are loaded with sensors and I can watch Ted sleep, meaning
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
Check my temperature, check my breathing patterns, understand what my heart rate is doing, and then adjust the bed angle and temperature and softness or hardness. As I sleep, you can turn a night's sleep into a digital service, and then give me a quality of sleep score in the morning. And all of a sudden, I'm no longer just marketing at the top of the funnel to get Ted to buy a mattress. I'm with Ted as he uses the product that he bought. And all of a sudden, I can offer new value added. And then, as you might imagine, can connect me to all sorts of other benefits, because now I'm in digital contact with me. So that's one example. But if you're driving a car that has GPS, you're taking part in a platform. If progressive insurance says, hey, let me watch you drive, and I'll give you a lower rate if you're a safe driver, they're asking me for visibility in exchange for value.
And so that's really the heart of a platform. And it transforms marketing because it moves marketing from pre-purchase only to always with the customer, or at least it gives the marketing department permission to raise their hand and said, I'd like to do more than the company than you normally think I do. I'm not just branding and digital marketing. I'm actually in a marketing relationship 24 seven. And so that's where I thought the book had.
Bennie
Okay. Right.
Ted
A lot to do with the transformation of marketing because it opens up brand new marketing disciplines that we haven't taught in school. And there's no good set of rules for we try to set down those rules in the book.
Bennie
Which is really interesting as you start to talk about and explore, the presence of platforms really becomes somewhat of an equalizer for fakes, right? So larger concerns and smaller concerns can each have access on a platform, which creates an increasing challenge for us as marketers, right? So it's not a secret weapon that only the large companies have and only the technology forward companies have. Really any organization can have access to this platform relationship.
Ted
That's right. That's right. That's the message of the book. Platforms were not possible until about 2008, 2009. E-commerce was possible. Obviously, digital lit up the customer's choose journey around 2000. Then we all put up websites. Then we all learned to sell through digital channels. But it was until Apple and Samsung invented smartphones in 2008.
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
And it was until Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, began to rent out their data centers and said, Hey, you can host your software and I'll run it for you. Those two things made it possible along with sensors, lower cost sensors, to really watch the customer on their use journey rather than their choose journey. And
So it's not a discipline that's been around for a long time. And the 2010s were the stories of the rock stars like Apple and Amazon and da da. Plus the hotshot disruptors, you know, for instance, Netflix, for instance, Zillow, for instance, Airbnb. But what's happening now in the 2020s is that every company is saying, I get this, this is actually strategic advantage. If the other guy can watch.
Bennie
Right.
Ted
The customer use and add value during use and I can't, I'm at a permanent competitive disadvantage. So platforms, I can no longer skip putting up a platform business in the 2020s and I could skip putting up a website in the 2000s. And so then the question is, how do I do that? If I'm a small business, I may need to use somebody else's platform because I may not be able to invest in it myself. I'm going to have to work on the services now.
Bennie
Uh huh. That's the question I was going to ask, you know, because we often have, I was going to ask you that question because we often have small businesses who I talked to, who immediately kind of tense up when we talk about these technological advantages or pivots that go through because they've been focused on the world in which they've inhabited. But what you're saying is that there is an opportunity that our small businesses shouldn't turn off the channel, shouldn't abandon the platform, right? To be able to dig in there to compete.
Ted
Yes. Yes. Should not. I think it's mostly what's missing is strategic creativity. There's a lot of these parts. I just talked to somebody the other day who has a saw maker. Think of something that's cutting through a metal pipe. And they just came up with an app where you put your cell phone down by the saw as you're sawing, and it listens.
Bennie
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Ted
To the sound of the saw sawing through the pipe. And based on that analysis, it can tell you when your blade is getting dull and when you need to go get your shreds. So you're sort of watching the customer use through sound on an iPhone. Can a small business do that? Yes, you can. You can buy the piece parts for that. And all of a sudden you go, I'm not a technology company. I make saw blades. And you can get into the platform business.
Bennie
Wow.
Ted
But what's lacking or what's often missing is strategic creativity.
Bennie
Right? Because in that space, you add value in a very distinct way. Right? So you.
Ted
Totally add value. Every time you watch the customer use, if you're only doing it to be a voyeur, or some people say, hey, once the airline company knows I'm shopping for a ticket, magically the price goes up the next time I come back to shop again. Are you using visibility against me, or are you using visibility on my side? It enters into these questions about ethics of data, ethics of privacy, customer permission. And
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
My brand becomes how much value do I own as you use it, I mean the modern definition of a brand.
Bennie
Right. I was going to ask you that question as we kind of lean into. With that type of exchange, there is an implied and explicit permission that needs to be established between the customer and the user. As our behaviors change, as you mentioned, this platform engagement wasn't possible 15 years ago. So as our consumer journey and life changes in there, what advice do you have for organizations to help navigate that? Right there.
Ted
There is. Yes.
Bennie
Their long standing customers are going to have a different relationship with them. They're new customers they're engaging with differently and they need to be tied into this notion of permission and data.
Ted
Yes. Well, so Bennie, the book is structured as a playbook. Think of a sports team, you know, that has, uh, let's go with football just for fun, right? Offensive plays, defensive pass plays, run plays, blitzes, et cetera. The book is organized like that in 24 plays that you can run. And it tries to break down this complicated question of becoming a platform company to more bite-sized initiatives.
Bennie
Excellent.Mm-hmm.
Ted
Some of them have to do, and I'm going to get to your question and this answer in just a sec here, some of them have to do with how I design a platform and the role that it plays in driving my business growth. Some of it has to do with how I operate it to accelerate sales and innovate. And some of it have to do with how I organize my company internally. Cause if I create a platform business, I may need to change some of my operating models. And so one of the plays is we call it better data deal.
How do you give the customer a better value deal for the data that they're going to let you have? And what do you need to do to get the customers permission? And so It really starts there can I convince the customer that The visibility that they're going to give up or the privacy they're going to give up. They're going to get back in spades in value. So hire the refrigerator company They now have a barcode reader in their refrigerators
Bennie
Right.
Ted
What's the value of that? Well, I can from my office, look at my cell phone and say, what's in the fridge. You can show it to me in order of what's going to go bad on what date. You add a little AI and you can say, what can I make with what's in the fridge? And all of a sudden I'm like, why wouldn't I let them watch? Cause they're helping my life get better. In fact, I could then say, and would you like to have somebody, you know, whole foods deliver?
Bennie
Right?
Ted
The missing ingredient for what you want to make tonight. So by the time you get home, it's on the doorstep. All of a sudden the value of letting me watch, the consumer is a no brainer. So I think that's really where it starts. And it is a social contract and it enters into these great debates of our time of privacy. If Amazon ever told me, let me geo-fence your kitchen and look in your pantry, not just in your fridge.
Bennie
Right.
Ted
Because I can read the barcodes of what's, would I ever do that? Well, what would be the value? Same story, but multiplied by what's in your kitchen, not what's in your fridge. So that whole question, the smart home is a whole question. Somebody's, you know, Nest, Alexa's listening, Nest is sensing, you know, how much do I go? Yep, they're on my side. I'm all good with that versus man, they're creeping me out because they're spying on me.
Bennie
Right. Right. When you think about platforms, we mentioned some of the big obvious ones. What are some of the newer platforms that, that are pique your curiosity? What are some of it? We know we have the, you know, the original generation.
Ted
I think Sephora's, yeah Sephora's saying, hey would you like a mirror that gives you advice on whether your makeup is matching your outfit? Would you like a color coordinator advisor every morning? And obviously from Sephora, you could then always order the missing color if you're not quite matching well what it is you're doing. Usually these platforms have a win-win, that's why the companies can invest. But I'm becoming a home
Bennie
Wow. Right.
Ted
Stylist advisor through a company. I think that's a good example of creative. Another one, I'm gonna stay in the makeup space for just a minute. Glossier built a whole business around a community platform. Some really interesting community businesses are popping up where the entrepreneur said, you know what? I think what my clients really want, the people that I talked to really want is healthier skin, not better makeup.
Bennie
OK. All right.
Ted
So let me start to do a blog around how we actually can take better care of our skin. So we need some makeup, but actually less and need better makeup that's for our skin. She achieved, she only went to retail through pop-ups, but she created a mailing list by creating a community of women who were giving each other advice that when she did her pop-ups on the third floor of a no window office, she had higher sales per square foot in New York than at the Apple store did because her community
Bennie
Mmm. Okay.
Ted
Was engaged with her along the journey. And good platforms don't only make it hub and spoke about company to customer, they make it spoke to spoke about customer to customer and how we create what we call a customer coalition. So that's one of the classic aspects of platforms that could a hair salon business create some form of a platform? I think they could. So there's plenty of
Bennie
Right.
Ted
Ways in that real estate agents are now saying, well, do I work on Zillow? Do I work on realtor.com? How do I run my business on a platform if I'm a mom and pop realtor? So there's various ways that platforms can take what you might think of as traditional down the street businesses and let them become technology companies.
Bennie
Now, we've talked a lot about the promise and opportunity and some really good emerging case studies. I'd love to pick your brain for those moments when platforms go bad. So when have you seen platform plays that have the best intention, but really kind of missed the developmental mark or missed the mark in the marketplace? Any cautionary tales?
Ted
Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I think trying to create a walled garden that restricts your customers usually leads to a failed platform. Good platforms have a lot of APIs, have a lot of connectors that you can connect your customer to outside of your company. So I think many businesses are used to saying, I sell what I make. And as a result, my value proposition is whatever fits inside my four walls.
Bennie
Right.
Ted
Platform companies say, I sell what I can connect to, whether I made it or not. And so I think one of the things platforms that don't work are too restrictive. You know, we spend a little bit of time about predatory platforms. When customers get the sense that you're using data against me, you're not using data for me. There's nothing that will kill a platform faster than that. And I'd say the third thing is just,
Bennie
Right. Hmm.
Ted
Being committed to the organizational ethos that it takes for your company. Because a platform makes your workers more interdependent on each other. They're often used to in a product line company being in these small tribes, product family A, product family B, product family C. And within those are sort of king of the hill, right? They don't need permission, they're driving their own P&L, blah, blah. In a platform often those product lines are now
Bennie
Mm-hmm. Right. Right.
Ted
Being asked to learn to talk to each other, to create use cases across, and to launch new initiatives in ways that are coordinated. And all of a sudden I go from being the owner of a siloed asset that I'm in control of, to being asked to be a contributor to a shared asset. And that changes the culture of my company. I have to work much more like a synchronized swimming team where we're dancing together in the water.
Bennie
Mm-hmm. Right.
Ted
One of the analogies we give is a synchronized swimmer and the parallel attention they need to give, they need to do personal performance. I'm treading water in nine feet of water. I can't touch the ground or I violate the rules of the sport. And I'm holding my breath for one to two minutes at a time while exercising. So I have personal needs. I have small team needs. I'm right beside somebody who's moving. I can give them a concussion. I can break their ribs.
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
But then I have these bigger team needs of are we all making it look like we're operating as one? And I've got to be able to train my mind to think about me, small us, big us at the same time. And leaders who don't do that, then have a hard time winning as a platform company because they're not adding the bigger us and the interconnection that the platform brings to the internal team.
Bennie
As we think about leaders, what's one bit of advice you would give to C-suite, emerging C-suites who are looking at how do we win through platforms, how do we win through a more contemporary market at play? What advice would you give for our listeners who are in that space?
Ted
Right. We give them a couple of bits of advice in the book. One is create greater clarity in your C-suite communications. Probably as you go around the room, you're all using the word platform and you've got a different movie in the back of your head. So we talk a little bit about how to demystify that, create a common glossary and learn to put adjectives in front of the word platform, our data creating platform, our platform service provider that we're buying from our
Bennie
Mm-hmm. Right.
Ted
Our own platform of how we market the idea of platforms. So there's a little bit about create clarity about how you communicate. And then the next big of advice we say is learn the playbook and find your plays. We say these 24 plays, you don't need to run them all at the same time, but you do know which ones you need to run until you learn the playbook, just like again, a sports team. So...
Bennie
Okay? Yep.
Ted
The book has a chapter on each of the 24 plays. That's the heart of the book. It's organized by type of play, but there's 24 chapters. And each play feels like a workshop. It explains the play. It gives you stories of companies who ran it. It gives you a framework for how to do it yourself. And it asks you questions that you need to answer. So this is going to sound self-serving, but I'd say learn what's in the book, because that's going to give you a vocabulary.
Bennie
Right.
Ted
About platforms that you're probably missing in a conceptual library that you might be missing. Most of us went to business school and learned how to win at product line businesses. The rules of platform businesses are different. So it's like a continuing education course for the leader would say, have your team read it, you read it and learn the shorthand of plays you could run. Then you can start to have the conversations of 2024, what three plays should we be running? 2025, what next three plays should we be running? So it's not linear, it's choose your own adventure based on where you think you're gonna get ROI on your investment.
Bennie
Now, sounds good. One of the things that strikes me in your background, and I wanna kind of pivot, so we have an opportunity to talk about it, is this notion of scale and radical scale. I love your kind of commitment to looking at microfinance and helping communities and spaces, and no other race space do you see kind of, how do I scale in a really dynamic and meaningful way? What got you involved in the microfinance community in this work?
Ted
Right. Bennie, it was 40 years ago, believe it or not, which I'm afraid I'm tending to my early 60s age. I was a kid out of college. I was interested in global poverty and hunger. And I was sort of disillusioned with efforts that I saw that felt like, you know, let me do something for you, in terms of the mentality of the eight care agencies that I was watching.
Bennie
Uh huh. Right.
Ted
And somebody said, hey, here's an article. And it was written by an early entrepreneur in the microfinance space. And he pretty much said, you know what I do? I make capital available to the poor. And I'm like, well, that's the smartest thing I've heard. Because they know they're the ones who need to have their own dream. What they need is empowerment through capital. And capital can shape itself around our dreams. The problem is it's very inefficient to lend $200 at a time, or people. If you did it the way that a bank does it, I'll sit behind a desk and evaluate your credit application. I'll have spent more than $200 just to figure out if you're trustworthy before I ever make you the loan. So there's no way I can afford to do that. So what Microfinance did was a lot of creative business innovation. They said, what if we allow the poor to be their own credit check? If I ask someone to say,
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
I know you, you're a community leader. Why don't you find 20 people and we're going to form what we call a trust bank. And we're going to lend to all 20 of you at the same time. One pot of money you distributed out, you get it paid back every week. And if you all pay it back, then you get a bigger loan and then a bigger loan. But if you don't pay it back, nobody gets the next loan. So all of a sudden you've created a risk pool. You've outsourced the credit check that they can do to folks in their community.
Bennie
Right.
Ted
Based on informal knowledge, not on credit scores. And they will choose the people that they're willing to put their name on the line for. And then we get 98% repayment and we can find out how to send out money, $200 at a time to very poor families and get it back and do it economically because we're rethinking how the business process works. So I've been a big fan of.
Bennie
Mm-hmm.
Ted
Microfinance is scalable business reinvention for the poor. And it turned into micro savings, not just micro lending. And it turned into micro insurance as well. And so it's been an area that I've been very much in awe of the people who do it day to day. I've served on a number of boards over those 40 years and helped on the World Bank, some World Bank boards as well. But the particular group that I've more invested my time in is the one that we refer to Opportunity International out of Chicago.
They're a great group.
Bennie
Really powerful work in spaces. We talked about kind of these unintended, but really unexpected powerful intersections of marketing in the world. And you kind of think about that marketing to drive business and using that mindset to help in a very dynamic way. It's based in there. What advice would you have for my younger listeners who are starting careers? And you talked about this. This became...
Ted
Mm. That's right. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that.
Bennie
Something that was a passion when you were in your early 20s. And it's continued to grow and evolve as you've grown and evolved. It's based in there. What advice do you have to kind of help my younger listeners find things that they can champion throughout their career?
Ted
Yes. Yeah. I think I've got a lot of friends who chose to dedicate their life to nonprofit work, which is super, just amazingly and super. I felt like in particular fields that were really, I was passionate about, I thought I would learn more by working in for-profit environments, but then trying to discipline myself to carve out time to try to take what I've been learning, helping wealthy companies get wealthier, I'm afraid. But then use it to...to try to make a fairer world. And so that's been my path. So for me, it's about finding coherence between what professionally drives me and then who's doing interesting work in the nonprofit or venture philanthropy sector that needs that capability. For me, it happened to be microfinance because I was a management consultant before I was a marketer. And so this whole business re-engineering. Mixed with go to market was really interesting to me. But I think everyone has their own story, their own journey, right? I would just say try to marry your professional passion with an outlet that really values the skill that you develop.
Bennie
There's really great advice there. So we talk about transformation and growth. So that's something that we're challenging ourselves, we challenge our teams and those around you. So as a guest, I'm gonna challenge you as well. So what's next for you? What do you think about in terms of growth for transformation?
Ted
Um, I right now feel like I'm in a heads down moment of taking the book that just came out in December. We were very fortunate to sort of hit number one in Amazon in the business category in the UK and the U S. Um, and we've been fortunate to sort of get our first award of the year, um, recently. So I'm trying to do a good job of being responsive to that, um, and use it to train people in my own firm. My firm has about 600 people in it.
Bennie
Uh-huh. Right.
Ted
So we're doing worldwide training on the intellectual property in the book of how to consult people using the book. And then I think the question that comes is, should I be trying to build a bit of a living website? We did 24 plays just because we had a word count limit and we had an energy limit, but there's more than 24.
Bennie
Right. So I was going to ask you this. So you're telling me there are 27 plays out here and those who are listening to our podcasts are going to now hear about the three unpublished. All right. All right.
Ted
There's more than that even, I would say, Bennie. I'd say mentally, I didn't address pricing. I put all of AI into one chapter. There's things around, we could have done more around the operating models by sort of archetype of platform business. So there's plenty more we could have done. So do I do a website that's about that when I write a follow-on book about it?
Bennie
Okay.
Ted
So I'm trying to figure out how to best use my time, as well as, you know, do justice to my marriage as I spent a lot of weekends over the last couple of years writing this one. So I wanna try to take the right amount of time from me and get back in touch with that, given how much this has been a marathon on the side of my job, as well as then think about how to intelligently keep building what it is that it looks like we've given birth to here in terms of the thinking in the book.
Bennie
Right. If you were to talk to a newly minted CMO in this moment, what's the one piece of advice you would give them?
Ted
Yes. I would say, first of all, make sure you know digital marketing cold, because if you're just a marketing communications person, you'll get crowded in your marketing team. Digital marketing will go somewhere else and it's going to become full journey marketing, not just top of the funnel marketing. So if I do know digital marketing and if my marketing team is respected for it, I would
I have a victim or victor moment coming up. I can ask for permission to become a full journey digital marketer. And I'll become more important than ever to my company and its success. I'll become a growth engine for my company. Or if I stay at only the top of the funnel, that function will probably be taken from me and handed to somebody called the growth operations marketer. Or the.
Bennie
Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Ted
Chief customer officer. And so I either have a expand or shrink moment if I'm a CMO. If I only know communications, the creative side of branding, this may not be an issue for me because I won't be considered for this role. But if I do know digital marketing in addition to Creative Comms, then I think I have an expansion opportunity and a strategic opportunity to have my team have a bigger role than ever, but I need to learn to team with customer success who's sitting on the other side of the sale team with my digital product managers who might be trying to do something that looks the same and embedded the if thens and their products. So I become part of a village on the use journey with some real competencies that my company needs. No one else in my company knows how to do if then at scale through software like my digital marketing team does. No one else knows how to create desire like my branding team does. How do I learn how to do post purchase branding to create desire for the customer to want to be a bigger user of my platform? So I own competencies that are relevant beyond the part of the journey that I'm used to playing. And my moment of courage is to offer to use them in new parts of the customer journey.
Bennie
I think that's an incredible phrase to end our conversation on my friend. You know, my path to courage, right? Your path to courage as a business leader, as a marketing leader, really starts as we think about it, winning strategically through platforms and how to succeed. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for the work that went into this with the team. And thank you for considering those other plays for us.
Ted
That's right. Well, and thanks to the AMA as well, Bennie, for being a sponsor of the book. We really appreciate it. I've been a big fan of the AMA for years, so I was thrilled to be able to collaborate.
Bennie
Well, it's a pleasure and this is the type of work that we always want to encourage that's pushing our practice and the profession forward. Thank you for sharing the journey, the work and your work in microfinance. And thank you all for joining us today. This has been an episode of AMA's Marketing And. I'm your host, Bennie Johnson. Thank you for joining. We encourage you to check out Winning Through Platforms by our guest, Ted Moser.
We also encourage you to join the AMA and find more information on our platform to help you and your marketing leadership journey and impact. Thank you once again.